


Jubilee

by JoAsakura



Series: The Dark Road [4]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-11
Updated: 2016-04-11
Packaged: 2018-06-01 16:33:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6527662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoAsakura/pseuds/JoAsakura
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, a new holiday is just what a species needs.</p><p>For Shepard's Birthday, 2016</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jubilee

They had never measured time before, but for the Harvest. An existence measured in cosmic years (and only Harbinger kept *that* time amongst them, the path of one long-lost solar system in it's orbit around the galactic core) where they had spent the interstitial years in a form of hibernation meant they had never truly needed a calendar before.

But, they still marked the time when the cycles would have happened, as planet-bound travelers might count the path of weeks. And at the start of each, now, no more call to the Harvest, the Catalyst raising them from their slumber to pluck the life from the Galaxy.

Now, they marked it with the birth of the Guide.

And it was all Nox's fault.

~~

They had been feeding along a string of dark matter, burning a path between the Old Garden and the New. The crèche played tag amongst the massive black hulls of their elders, darting like tiny laughing silver fish between whales.

Within the infinite halls of the gestalt, Shepard watched as Harbinger was attacked by a swarm of the New, their forms flickering with playful combinations of colour and shape as they tried to show him the dysprosium sculptures and radioactive split-wavelength doodles they scrawled across each other's hulls.

"You seem pleased." Nox sidled up beside him, jeweled wings neatly folded up and their gleaming eyes reflecting the burnt-silver finish of the Shepard's form. 

Shepard's core still showed the violence that had been done to his shipbody, golden gashes slicing through his armoured form and across the human face he so rarely wore anymore. He turned eyes, still blue as newborn stars, to Nox and a smile pulled across his scarred face. "I was just remembering."

"You remember more than the rest of us, so you're going to have to be a little more specific." Nox leaned against the wall beside him, enormous virtual windows showing the vast expanse of space around them and the lighted path of the distance they still had to travel.

"When the human Shepard took the Catalyst's challenge, when he refused to let any other beings die in the Harvest." Shepard chuckled softly as across the way, Harbinger nearly vibrated in annoyance he would never openly show the New. "He didn't know what was going to happen as the Crucible devoured him. Didn't know he would give birth to me. Certainly couldn't know that cycles later, the 'Harbinger of his Perfection'..." Shepard made a dramatic set of air quotes, eyes twinkling. "... Would be covered in finger paints."

[I heard that.] Harbinger gave him a pointed look as one of the New climbed up to nestle in his arms, a roiling ball of iridescent cubes.

"Your birth marked the end of the old cycles and the start of the new." Nox noted, nodding their head with a gentle wave of feathery spikes. "My peoples celebrated, even far into their spacefaring years, the festivals of light in the darkness, of feast in famine and warmth in the cold. They marked the inevitable presence of life, when surrounded by death. So much so, even when the Harvest came, they still remembered their festivals." They nudged Shepard.

"You are our light in the darkness, my Guide. You are the inevitable life born out of death." Nox grinned, poking Shepard in the side. "You are a festival."

"I am not a festival, Nox. I'm just a ship doing his best to keep the rest of you from wandering off and getting lost in dark space." Shepard muttered with a chuckle as Harbinger went down under a tide of the New. "Doing his best to give the New a home they can make their own after we're long gone, and forgotten."

"Oh, you'll never be forgotten. I can guarantee that." Nox's snout broke into the elaborate curl that signified a grin. 

~~

"Nox." Shepard was staring out of the gestalt's virtual windows as the New scrambled about and struggled to decorate a herd of wandering cometary matter with red and white stripes visible only to the fleet's sensor arrays.

Behind him, Harbinger's face was impassive, but his amusement was clearly audible throughout the gestalt.

"Yes, Shepard?" The smaller ship came alongside, but didn't appear beside them in the room.

"Can you tell me what the little ones are doing?" His scarred face pulled into a frown he didn't really feel.

"I told you, you'd never be forgotten. Sometimes a festival just needs a little push."


End file.
